In the nineteen forties Max Meldrum wrote the book “Science of Appearances”. That book has now been out of print for half a century and is a valuable collector’s item.  Max Meldrum taught one of Australia’s later leading tonal painters, Alan Martin.  Alan Martin taught me tonal impressionism.  It is this same tonal impressionist technique that I am now teaching.

To paint you must first be able to see things as they are.  This is not an automatic process as people discover when they first pick up a pencil and draw and discover the drawing is out of proportion and perspective.  Learning to see things your mind believes to be black or white as a pattern of light and dark, and that there will be areas within the part your mind believes to be white that can be darker than the part your mind knows to be black is a mind awakening.  What you wake up to with the aid of a skilled tonal impressionist tutor is that you have been seeing what your mind has been telling you. You actually need to be taught how to see things the way your eyes are actually seeing them without applying the distortions that come from within your mind.

What I do when I take a beginner student, is I teach them how to see things as they actually are without the mind altering or distorting that image.  This can be an exciting revelation.   It is a skill or science that can be taught, demonstrated and with practice, with a lifetime of practice, it can be developed.

By returning to teach, just one student I am teaching myself again the very fundamentals of how to see things as they are and not as my brain says they are.

The hand was painted as a class demonstration in less than 2 hours, as lesson 4 in tonal impressionism oil painting. My student repeated the same painting of the hand.

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